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This book explores the hidden world of everyday learning in the lives of manufacturing workers from a social perspective focusing on computers. It is based on life-history interviews, ethnographic observations in homes and factories, survey materials and microanalysis of human computer interaction.

This book consists of a set of studies exploring the concept of 'communities of practice', which has been influential in social sciences, education, and management in recent years. Its main purpose is to emphasize the importance of areas such as language, power, and social context.

Vygotsky's unique vision of education, from a social constructivist point of view is presented here, with illustrative examples from classroom studies between teacher and child. This unique volume will be of tremendous benefit to the field of education, as well as sociolinguistics, psychology and researchers.

This book offers a critical reconstruction of the fundamental ideas and methods of artificial intelligence research. Through close attention to the metaphors of AI and their consequences for the field's patterns of success and failure, it argues for a reorientation of the field away from thought in the head and towards activity in the world.

In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.

An international, interdisciplinary overview of research on activity theory, first published in 1999. Activity theory bridges the gulf between the individual subject and the societal structure by taking the object-oriented, artifact-mediated collective activity as its unit of analysis.

Building Virtual Communities examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. Contributors to this volume explore this question by drawing on their different theoretical backgrounds, methodologies, and personal experience with virtual communities. This book will interest educators, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in human- computer interaction.

This book re-examines the 'distributed' social and cultural contextual factors that affect human cognition.

This book presents a theory of learning that starts with the assumption that engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we get to know what we know and by which we become who we are. The primary unit of analysis of this process is neither the individual nor social institutions, but the informal 'communities of practice' that people form as they pursue shared enterprises over time. To give a social account of learning, the theory explores in a systematic way the intersection of issues of community, social practice, meaning, and identity. The result is a broad framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation. This ambitious but thoroughly accessible framework has relevance for the practitioner as well as the theoretician, presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic.

This 2003 book presents innovative ideas in the field of educational psychology, learning, and instruction. These ideas were first formulated by Russian psychologist and educator Lev Vygotsky. This volume provides coverage of all main concepts of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and emphasizes its importance for the understanding of child development.

This 2007 book provides a way of understanding how human actions and technological artifacts are intertwined. The author shows how leading edge technologies can rest on very old-fashioned assumptions, while more modest initiatives suggest innovative approaches to technology design and use.

Forms a diverse and fascinating look at situated learning. A distinctive feature of the book is the wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem of understanding cognition in everyday settings.

This book explores the way complex systems affect everyday work and interaction through video-based field studies looking at the introduction of basic information systems in general medical practice, news production, the control room of London Underground and computer aided design in architectural practice.

In its description of several years of painstaking classroom observations and carefully crafted experimental interventions, the 'construction zone' makes clear the cleavage lines between the everyday requirements of classroom teaching and the practice of experimental psychologists. The best intentions of researchers to improve education are often undermined by such differences. The 'construction zone' is the shared psychological space within which teachers construct environments for their students' intellectual development and students construct deeper understandings of the cultural heritage embodied in the curriculum. The core of the book is a set of analyses of children's developmental changes during classroom lessons and individual tutorials designed to teach basic concepts in such diverse areas as natural science, social studies, and arithmetic. Fusing techniques currently in wide use in microsociology, experimental psychology, and ethnographic studies of the classroom, the authors offer a compelling vision of intellectual development as a process of joint constructive interaction mediated by cultural artifacts. Their approach makes it possible to retain the strength of a developmental perspective which treats intellectual change as a constructive process in the spirit of Piaget, while making it clear that developmental change is simultaneously a social process of cultural transformation as emphasized by Vygotsky and his students.

The chapters in this 2004 volume explore the theoretical, design, learning, and methodological questions with respect to designing for and researching web-based communities to support learning. Taken as a collection, these manuscripts point to the challenges and complex tensions that emerge when designing for web-supported community.

This 2004 book represents a multidisciplinary collaboration that highlights the significance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to modern scholarship in the field of language and literacy. Chapters are contributed by authors who write from various perspectives.

This book addresses the primary question: how is mental functioning related to the cultural, historical, and institutional settings in which it exists? Although the contributors speak from different perspectives, there is a clear set of unifying themes that run through the volume.

How do schools influence the kind of person a child becomes? Changing Classes tells the story of a small, poor, ethnically-mixed school district in Michigan's rust-belt, a community in turmoil over the announced closing of a nearby auto assembly plant.

Building Virtual Communities examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. Contributors to this volume explore this question by drawing on their different theoretical backgrounds, methodologies, and personal experience with virtual communities. This book will interest educators, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in human- computer interaction.

This 2003 book presents innovative ideas in the field of educational psychology, learning, and instruction. These ideas were first formulated by Russian psychologist and educator Lev Vygotsky. This volume provides coverage of all main concepts of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and emphasizes its importance for the understanding of child development.

This 2004 book represents a multidisciplinary collaboration that highlights the significance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to modern scholarship in the field of language and literacy. Chapters are contributed by authors who write from various perspectives.

People who learn to solve problems 'on the job' often use different methods from people who learn in theory. Using a case study of Brazilian street children, this book examines the differences between the street mathematics they use in markets and mathematics they learn in school. The authors also discuss ways of trying to put theory and practice together in mathematics teaching.

The authors in this 2000 collection use Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of human development to frame their analyses of schooling, with particular emphasis on the ways in which literacy practices are mediated by social interaction and cultural artifacts. This volume extends Vygotsky's cultural-historical theoretical framework to embrace nuances of learning and development.